Climate change has an impact on the lives of millions of human beings, particularly the most vulnerable populations and the most exposed territories. The most recent projections say that there will be global warming of between 2 and 7°C and a rise in sea levels of between 40 and 110 cm by 2100¹. These projections will inevitably affect the security of the populations of countries that are considered to be economically and politically strong. Already in 2012, Margareta Wahlström, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction pointed out that affluent countries were not immune to this situation: “Certain very rich, highly developed countries, with economies that are entirely interdependent with the world economy, have been very severely hit, from New Zealand to Japan, by way of Australia².”

Natural disasters are increasingly intense and frequent in Japan. The last thirty years have been difficult for the country, with a succession of typhoons and torrential rains that have caused numerous victims and considerable damage. In addition, the Japanese population is highly concentrated in coastal and riverside areas, half its inhabitants (126 million people) living on 10% of the territory³. It is important to point out here that certain coastal cities are partially built below sea level. Therefore, for all these reasons, although tsunamis are not directly related to climate change, the inhabitants of coastal areas are more vulnerable to these geological events.

This article focuses on the disaster that struck Japan in 2011, and more specifically on the city of Kamaishi (釜石市)⁴, which was badly affected by the tsunami. We will analyse this natural disaster in connection with the initial results of a PhD project on the territorial nature of resilience and vulnerability. Firstly, we will look at the evolving nature of the concepts of vulnerability and resilience. Secondly, we will present an analysis grid that aims to establish the characteristics of territorial resilience based on the national and regional context in which a natural disaster takes place. Finally, we will look at the approach that was adopted to manage the post-disaster situation in Kamaishi, an economically and politically strong area where local disaster prevention initiatives were given priority.

The evolving nature of the concepts of vulnerability and resilience

Given the combination of natural disasters related to the natural life of the earth⁵ and those related to imposed changes (climate change)⁶, human populations have no choice other than to adapt and take action. This can take the form of an emergency response to a humanitarian crisis or a programme to increase resilience which aims to ‘increase resistance to shocks and constraints as well as recovery and reconstruction capacities’, (Sendai Conference, 2015)⁷.

It is worth pointing out two essential points here. Firstly, an event is only a ‘disaster’ if the affected community has difficulty in ‘coping’ with it. Secondly, the ability of a community to cope with a situation obviously depends on its exposure to a hazard and its economic and social capacity to deal with the shock. The weaker the resilience of a territory to the effects of a natural disaster, the greater the negative impacts will be.

Two conclusions emerge from this: on the one hand, territories with low socio-territorial capital will be at a great disadvantage to recover following a disaster. Territories are therefore not equal in relation to disasters, which adds a further dimension to the vulnerability factors that already exist. And on the other hand, this leads to a definition of vulnerability related to the issue of climate change. As such, vulnerability is, ‘The degree to which a system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes. Vulnerability is a function of the character, magnitude, and rate of climate variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity, and its adaptive capacity’ (IPCC, 2001). This definition has the merit of establishing three factors that characterize vulnerability: character, scale and rhythm. In the current context, vulnerability is no longer static, but of an evolving nature.

Finally, though the notions of resilience and vulnerability are not exchangeable – because they do not involve the same factors and do not have the same semantic roots – they are nevertheless interconnected. Indeed, the two notions are strongly interdependent in terms of recovering from a crisis: a population will be all the more resilient if they have learned from a crisis that has affected them and, at the same time, the worse the consequences of a disaster, the more it will challenge the resilience of a population by requiring more resources to be mobilized to cope with it. Resilience and vulnerability therefore tend to evolve together.

If resilience is understood as a response to fragility that is perceived to be real, awareness of this fragility has an effect both on the desire and the capacity to rebuild after the disaster and on the capacity to prevent future disasters. Theoretically, rebuilding exactly what existed before is problematic as it shows that the disaster has not been taken into account. On the other hand, a reconstruction that integrates lessons, or that adapts to disasters, is not an optimal solution either. Indeed, this only attempts to reduce the impact of vulnerability factors. But when vulnerability is of an evolving nature, so is resilience.

This leads to an evolving, more or less zero-sum, situation where it is possible to be both vulnerable to a shock and perfectly resilient when it takes place due to the prevention measures that have been taken. There are many examples of cities that were highly exposed to risks and were hit by disasters, and then managed to bounce back, recover, rebuild and re-establish stability. This is notably the case of Kobé after the earthquake of 1995 (Menoni, 2001) and Kamaishi in 2011 (Alalouf-Hall, 2019).

In contrast to the concept of vulnerability, which is passive, the concept of resilience encourages action as it provides a vision or a project that is both consensual and inclusive (Lallau, 2011) for different levels of government or of the international aid sector, which explains why it is so successful. Even though it can be defined in various ways, the concept is tangible and quantifiable, and is therefore reassuring (Djament-Tran et al., 2011). Thus, resilience has been incorporated into the fields of evaluation and risk management through the creation of indicators, the development of ‘good practice’ guides, and the development of standards that aim to objectivize it⁸.

Lastly, resilience focuses on the individual responsibility of affected people. As such, increasing resilience is merely a case of monitoring the relevant indicators. Thomas (2010) argues that crisis management policies see vulnerable people as citizens who are individually affected by disaster events; citizens who are expected to take part in their own rehabilitation. Unfortunately, this vision does not take into account the forces that have already been in place for several decades – local standards and practices – as if risk and disaster management practices were applied in ‘virgin’ territory.

A proposed colour chart for territorial resilience

In analysing vulnerability, we might expect a strong state to be more resilient. In reality, the level of resilience within any state is not uniform. Within each state, there are different levels of resilience: certain regions, towns, neighbourhoods and activities recover more quickly than others. We saw this recently in the United States following the major fires in California that destroyed rich, inhabited areas, and which were quickly rebuilt. The situation was quite different in Louisiana after hurricane Katrina in 2005, where it took a long time to revitalize the territory. Five years after the disaster event, only 20% of the city of New Orleans was considered to have recovered (Hernandez, 2010 and Huret, 2010). And yet, these two events affected the same country, thus raising the question of how we define ‘fragile’ and ‘strong’ areas.

Given that there are still doubts about the relevance of tools that measure the capacity of a system to adapt (Dauphiné, 2004), how can the general intervention capacity of a territory be evaluated? This focuses less on the state in which the people affected by a disaster event find themselves than on the processes that lead to this state in different types of territory.

According to Villar and Guézo (2017), territorial resilience to natural disasters comes from a territory’s capacity to adapt and organize, which allows the territory to overcome damaging events. Territorial resilience means that the relevant regulatory frameworks are in place allowing collaboration, bringing together expertise and know-how, and allowing differences to be overcome. The territory integrates these regulatory frameworks and reflects different types of capital, as well as weaknesses and shortcomings in terms of the capacity to take action.

In order to identify differences in the capacity to cope with a large-scale disaster, we have developed a colour chart that allows us to determine what a territory’s resilience might be. We have given an example of a major event to illustrate each type of situation and territory.

Table 1: Territorial resilience colour chart (simplified version)

A very resilient territory (++) is capable of anticipating upheaval, whether sudden or slow-onset, thanks to monitoring and planning ahead, and of mitigating its effects if it takes place. If an unpredictable disaster event were to take place, this type of territory is capable of recovering and bouncing back, learning from and adapting to the situation, through innovation, thus increasing its resilience and decreasing its vulnerability. Villar and Guézo (2017) describe them as ‘territories on the move’. In other terms, the more a territory is resilient, the more the actions of competent organisations will be adaptable and malleable. What is more, the relation to nature will be conserved more, as the inhabitants of such a territory are used to the vagaries of nature. And community ties, which are well established and operational, encourage acts of solidarity. Locally run initiatives have a greater impact here than initiatives run by foreign powers.

In contrast, in the case of territories with low or no resilience (–), it will be more difficult to have programmes designed by the international aid system alongside those implemented by local organisations. A territory with low or no resilience will have great difficulty anticipating upheavals, whether sudden or slow-onset, or to correct or mitigate their effects. The crisis linked to the disaster event will also last a long time. The relation to nature will not be a priority and community networks will be under stress.

The objective of the colour chart is to allow preventive assessments to be carried out in order to calibrate the actions to be deployed. Such calibration means that we can adopt a ‘listening’ position rather than a ‘bureaucratic’ one: the aim is to combine the capacity to take action ‘based on the territorial reality’ and to take into account ‘the disaster-related reality’ or the scale of the disaster. Universal operational guides, based on the scale of a disaster, can be improved. It is a case of coordinating different actors, while taking into account their respective strengths and weaknesses.

The case of a disaster in a highly resilient territory (++): Kamaishi (2011)

On 11 March 2011, an earthquake of magnitude 9 hit the north-east of Honshu, the largest island of Japan. This earthquake caused a tsunami with waves of up to 40 metres. Following the tsunami, the Japanese authorities counted 19 000 dead and 6 000 injured. Half a million people found themselves without shelter. Explosions and radioactive leaks led to the closure of Fukushima Daichi and Fukushima Daini nuclear plants.

This disaster produced a veritable reversal of roles in terms of international humanitarian aid. Indeed, more used to being a donor, Japan found itself in a sufficiently critical position to appeal for international help. According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Financial Tracking Service, Japan received more than 735 million dollars in donations, the highest post-disaster amount of 2011 apart from the donations assigned to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa⁹.

In 2005, the coastal regions had been warned that a mega tsunami would happen within the next thirty years, and Kamaishi was directly concerned by these projections. In this region, it is said that each generation will witness a significant disaster. Kamaishi’s history has been linked to natural hazards for a long time: the Meiji Sanriku earthquake (1896) caused the deaths of around 60% of the population of the city and the Showa Sanriku earthquake (1933) caused the death of 164 people and the disappearance of 240 others¹⁰. The memory of these disaster events is ever present in the city of Kamaishi. There are plaques that show the level reached by the waves and memorials in various neighbourhoods invite the inhabitants and people passing through to remember what happened.

Table 2: The history of tsunamis in the region and the damage that resulted

With such a history, a high level of resilience has been established due to the lessons learned and prevention measures taken after each disaster. Like other towns in Japan, Kamaishi invested in technological prevention and awareness-raising: the construction of dykes and shelters, the distribution of maps showing at-risk areas (Suppasri et al. 2013). Among these projects was the construction of a seawall that is so big that it is in the Guinness Book of Records (Trucker, 2013).

To complement these prevention projects, the town also decided to raise awareness among young people. Thus, in 2005, Toshitaka Katada, a Civil Engineering Professor at Gunma University and Disaster Prevention specialist, conducted an initial class at the Kamaishi Higashi Junior High School at the request of Kamaishi Educational Council. This led to the creation of a complete training programme in 2008, which is based on local knowledge, ‘Tsunami Tendenko’¹¹.

The disaster of 11 March 2011 was much worse than anything that had been predicted: a large part of the seawall collapsed when it was hit by the first wave, which was 20 metres high, leaving the city defenceless. There were 1064 deaths and a third of the 5000 houses were partly or completely destroyed. The fishing industry was also very badly affected with more than 97% of fishing boats damaged.

A distinctive characteristic of the disaster that took place in Kamaishi is that there were very few deaths among the young, the city stating that 99.8% of minors survived. People talk of ‘the Kamaishi miracle’. According to the local teachers and the city’s Educational Council, this is due to the disaster prevention programme that was launched a few years before (Birmingham & McNeill, 2012).

In 2011, pupils received at least three years of training in prevention and were better prepared than older people to deal with such a disaster. The region’s natural hazards are studied in history, geography and physics programmes. ‘Survival’ classes are also given, the aim of the city and the teachers being to try to improve understanding of the region’s natural hazards and their effects so that they are no longer feared and can be lived with. The ‘miracle’ thus led to widespread recognition and praise for the Tsunami Tendenko (Kodama, 2015) and the school programmes.

The Great Tohoku showed that major earthquakes can still take place and that the Japanese coast is a vulnerable urban area. In December 2013, the Basic Act for National Resilience was adopted and its first article clearly states that its objective is to build Japan’s resilience nationally in terms of disaster preparedness . For its part, Kamaishi municipal authority has also reviewed its prevention measures: reinforcing the resistance of infrastructure, raising the ground level, transferring junior high schools to higher ground, and increasing food stocks and emergency blankets. The city even hosted some matches at the Rugby World Cup in a brand new stadium with a capacity of 16 000 spectators in September 2019.

Conclusion

The ‘Kamaishi miracle’ is not in any way miraculous: it shows that there is a need for reflection before and after a disaster. Admittedly, it took place in a region where, despite certain signs of underdevelopment, there was significant mobilization by the state, the population, civil society and businesses. Furthermore, the recurrence of ‘tsunami’-type events in the past, and subsequent reflection, meant that there was understanding of the behaviour to adopt in the event of a disaster. Local lessons led to low-cost behavioral standards that proved to be effective and superior to cutting-edge technological solutions. This specific case therefore shows the importance of taking into account local knowledge and the witness accounts of those who have experienced a natural disaster, and of looking for simple, affordable and realistic solutions. Reproducing the Kamaishi model is nevertheless a challenge, particularly in very disadvantaged or un-resilient regions.

Looking at the events of 11 March 2011 at different levels (regional or local), helps us to understand the nature of the disaster, and certain urban development, risk management and protection issues. Based on observation in the field, we are also able to see that with each disaster, the Kamaishi region has increased its expertise in terms of risk management, recovery and resilience. Though they are used to natural disasters, its inhabitants are aware that natural hazards are not one-off disturbances: they reveal flaws in the development model.

In a context where there is a lot of potential to create wealth, and where there are significant natural risks, the existing model is essentially based on technological innovation and pays no heed to natural realities. It leaves little room for resilience to evolve. The region of Tohoku would have been very badly affected if the reactors of the two nuclear plants had exploded. Some situations, which are the result of human decisions, lead to absolute vulnerability…

To conclude, let us stress that territorial resilience raises the question of the relationship between disaster events, national and international institutions and the civilian population in an affected area. It is achieved by reconnecting with local knowledge from both the past and the present, and by changing the ‘spirit of the times’ based on the pursuit of wealth through economic growth for the sake of economic growth.

1. Projections for the end of the century from IPCC and Climeri-France reports (2019) compared to the pre-industrial period (1850) referred to in ‘International aid and humanitarian action: what can be done in the face of impending catastrophe?’, Médiapart, October 2019.
2. Press conference to mark the first anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, March 2012.
3. ‘Les défis du Japon à la remorque des changements climatiques’, Le Devoir, 8 April 2019.
4. I am conscious of the repetition in writing ‘city of Kamaishi’ as the ideogram ‘shi’ (市), included here as a suffix, means ‘city’ in Japanese. We should really say, ‘the city of Kama’, but this would not respect the Japanese toponym.
5. Geological events, for example, are to some extent natural manifestations located at the surface of the globe. Their connection to climate change has not been proven.
6. According to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change is increasing the number of extreme meteorological, hydrological and climatic events: cyclones, hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, torrential rains, storms, etc.
7. https://www.unops.org/fr/news-and-stories/news/strengthening-resilience-building-back-better
8. Examples of this are: insurance law which determines the resources available for the recovery, international law which influences the reaction to major disasters, and the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters.
9. https://fts.unocha.org/global-funding/countries/2011?order=total_funding&sort=desc
10. Second Regional Japan Coast Guard Headquarters
11. Tendenko in the local dialect means ‘each one’ or ‘individually’ (Yamori, 2014). This local prevention measure, passed from generation to generation, encourages people to protect their own lives by immediately going to a place that has been previously identified within their family. People do not look for each other, they meet directly at this meeting place.